Facebook today announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire WhatsApp, a rapidly growing cross-platform mobile messaging company, for a total of approximately $16 billion, including $4 billion in cash and approximately $12 billion worth of Facebook shares. The agreement also provides for an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units to be granted to WhatsApp’s founders and employees that will vest over four years subsequent to closing.

A huge deal. WhatsApp is one of the biggest messaging services is in the world - maybe even the biggest.

Facebook chat uses XMPP. Whatsapp uses a closed kind of XMPP. Great for the future of XMPP. Hopefully Facebook will keep it open.

Also good for security. Whatsapp really did hit the bottom of security.

Let's fight against SIP as it is mostly used to maintain old-fashioned phone numbers. The XMPP style "numbers" can just be the same as your email address - and that is just how I like it. One address, multiple channels (mail, IM, audio, video). Also, old numbers are controlled outside the own organization, while XMPP is fully controlled by the domain owner.

Facebook chat uses XMPP. Whatsapp uses a closed kind of XMPP. Great for the future of XMPP. Hopefully Facebook will keep it open.

I would be happy if Facebook could just figure out a way to deliver notifications properly for private messages, esp on Android. I only get notifications for about 1 out of every 5 PMs I get, across a variety of Android devices, and the Windows 8.1 Metro app.

Facebook isn't federated, so the fact that they use XMPP isn't very useful. However if they axe this Whatsapp abomination and merge it into their regular XMPP service it would be still a good outcome (one non standard walled garden service less).

Facebook chat uses XMPP. Whatsapp uses a closed kind of XMPP. Great for the future of XMPP.

I like XMPP. I like how it's decentralized and works similar to e-mail and I like the fact that I can host my own server for that. I just wish there were some good clients to use with XMPP, especially for Android; I'm using Xabber on my phone, but it's...rather limited. It doesn't do audio or video chat, it doesn't do file-transfer, it's just barebones text-chat. I tried Tigase-messenger, but it's buggy and often my messages get lost in /dev/null for no apparent good reason.

Also, I haven't heard of anything interesting happening wrt. the protocol itself, it seems to have stagnated and it's gotten outdated. It doesn't offer any of the things that people look for in modern IM-applications and platforms, like e.g. hires avatars, or the ability to store a small selection of pictures on the server on your profile so others could peruse them even when you're not present. Especially the avatars are horribly outdated by today's standards as the spec officially, as far as I can remember, restricted them to 64x64 pixels in size.

IMHO there should be at least some more attention paid to features that your average citizen uses just so we could hopefully wean more of them out of proprietary, insecure solutions. I mean, we all would benefit if a secure, fully-open spec gained ground.

I agree that in general clients are lagging behind. Telepathy framework still doesn't support OTR and ZRTP for instance and clients which are built on top of it don't enable them accordingly (KDE Telepathy, Sailfish one and others).

Just to stop spreading inaccurate information: SIP does not require the use of old fashioned phone numbers, the username can be almost anything, and in fact often is internally in a PBX, and is only translated to a phone number when you try to like, make a phone call :-)

Let's fight against SIP as it is mostly used to maintain old-fashioned phone numbers. The XMPP style "numbers" can just be the same as your email address - and that is just how I like it. One address, multiple channels (mail, IM, audio, video). Also, old numbers are controlled outside the own organization, while XMPP is fully controlled by the domain owner.

Given that it reuses components from libjingle, it may also be easier to bridge WebRTC to XMPP+Jingle than to SIP.

(Which matters to me because I want to ditch Skype and WebRTC shows the most promise for an open-source VoIP system where I can shoulder the burden of making it work for my non-technical friends.)